header it generates. If, on the other hand, an agent receives an RFC822/MIME
message containing 8bit material in a header, then the message is clearly
illegal in format and the agent is free to do with it as it pleases. Either
way
this requirement doesn't apply so there is no issue to resolve. In fact by
making this statement you create an issue where none actually exists.
Right, my mistake. Bang head on wall ten times repeating: 'Even on 8bit
or binary transport, headers must be US-ASCII'. It's going better now.
Actually, it should be body part. Bodies refers only to the data, and that's
not where the encoding is specified.
Mmmm.... The content type gives the media type of the data in the body (this
is stated in the definition), and don't tell anything about the header. So
one should always speak about the 'type of a body', and this has finally
nothing to do with the 'dispute' about body parts/messages.
You are confusing type and encoding here. They are quite different. It
makes sense to talk about the type of the body (data), since its an inherent
characteristic of the data itself. It also makes sense to talk about the type
of a body part, which refers to the content type labelling.
Encodings are quite different, however, since they are associated with the
representation of the body rather than the body itself. As such, talking about
the encoding of the body or data confuses matters, since it is not an inherent
quality the body or data possesses. It does make sense, however to talk about
the encoding of a body part, since a body part includes the content labelling
where the encoding is specified.
These rules are specific to messages. As such, the change to the word
entity isn't appropriate in this section.
I don't know... What can be splitted in fragments ?
Theoretically you can split any entity into fragments, although it is by no
means clear that you'd ever want to split up anything other than a top-level
message. These rules, however, only apply to messages. They are completely
unnecessary and in fact make no sense in other contexts. Splitting a body part,
for example, is trivial -- you just bust it up and slap labels on the pieces.
That's it. Reassembling means nothing more than removing the fragment headers
and concatenating the pieces. The only time this gets to be more complicated is
when you're splitting a message, since you cannot simply slap a new header on a
message and be done with it.
Only a message, or
any entity ? In the document (before any of the changes I suggested) both
words are used in the section, so I really can't see what the true
intention is.
The word entity is only used once, and I've already changed it to
message.
Ned